It started, as most moral panics do, on morning television. In March, 1983, Dr. Richard Smith sat down with Frank Bough, the tawny host of the BBC’s Breakfast Time, to discuss his study, “Sun Beds and Melanoma,” recently published in the British Medical Journal. Pale and earnest, Smith described the risks of both ultraviolet radiation and mutagenic exposure. Bough listened and glistened, evincing enough interest not to offend his guest and enough skepticism not too offend his audience.
In her new book The Rise and Fall of the Sunbed in Britain – sure to sell tens of copies –historian Fabiola Creed describes what happened next. The Daily Mail ran all caps headlines and The Times sniffed at the vulgarity of it all. Dermatologists, happy to field calls from journalists, piled on. It took a few years, but eventually the scolds settled on a neologism for all those working-class women in Essex and gay men in Manchester: tanorexics1.
This kind of thing happens all the time. It’s Mountain Dew kills your sperm. It’s Pumpkin Spice Lattes contain antifreeze. Its McDonald’s fries don’t decompose.
The last acceptable form of class snobbery is science-based condescension toward middle-class people making unhealthy decisions. Critiques are dressed up in wellness lingo, but the real conversation is now and has always been about rationality. Science began as a gentleman’s pursuit defined against the self-interested bullshittery of men with commercial concerns, and it still carries vestigial traces of its evolution: linguistic austerity, institutional bias, and expert froideur. The result is often a dismissive and uninquisitive attitude toward mass culture. Dr. Smith wasn’t wrong on the data, but he was wrong about people. They want color. The “Make America Healthy Again” movement is proof of this. It is also, ironically, a natural experiment testing whether the masses can behave with scientific rationally.
Maybe not.
Using science to moralize taste is old hat. In A Social History of Truth, historian Steven Shapin describes how seventeenth-century fops invented the ostensibly democratizing concept of scientific objectivity, then built institutions – most notably the Royal Society – to keep the riffraff out. “To be believed,” Shapin explains, “the experimental philosopher had to be the kind of person who was believed.” When it came down to it, the men who sought to wrestle knowledge away from folk traditions and systematize curiosity were mostly concerned with class-coded credibility. The Royal Society’s motto, nullius in verba – take nobody’s word for it – was an polite lie.
If science began as manners, it’s fair to say that we have inherited both a remarkably effective system for knowledge creation and a skepticism about whether the Homer Simpsons of the world ought to be operating it. Even today, Nobel laureates overwhelmingly came from affluent backgrounds – on average, around the top 10–15% of family income. So when a PhD declares that “the science is clear” about vaping or seed oils, they are invoking not just scholarship but the moral authority of a gentleman. Knowledge workers, who fetishize qualifications, tend to parrot expert rhetoric. It appeals to our sense of moral authority and our belief that we’re not suckers even though we backhandedly brag about sleep deprivation, which is waaaay more dangerous than any tanning bed short of microwave.
One of the more compelling subplots in The Rise and Fall of the Sunbed in Britain is a weird campaign by the Financial Times which “repeatedly approbated the use of sunbeds, demonstrating how privileged groups held tanning culture in high regard.” Rest assured the FT wasn’t covering sunbeds because of their effect on global markets. The FT is a commercial enterprise that was flattering its readers by scoffing at middle-class vulgarity.
The FT never went after tanning. City Boys love a Bank Holiday in Majorca.
Exceptions get carved out for unhealthy behavior. Consider Botox. In 1997, The New York Times warned that Botox could “freeze faces into masks of vanity,” while The Guardian called it “the new wonder-toxin that freezes time - and sometimes faces.” Two decades later, the same papers described it as “maintenance.” They don’t want to piss off their youthful-looking readerships. Did Botox get safer? A little, sure. But mostly it became popular with the kind of person who was believed.
This kind scientific snobbery isn’t all some David Cronenberg body horror trip. Much of it is low-stakes if not mundane. In 2022, The Filtery ran the headline “Are Yankee Candles Toxic? (Spoiler: Sort of.)” The story warned about paraffin and volatile organic compounds. But Yankee Candles aren’t so different (cheaper wax, heavier scents) from Boy Smells candles or Le Labo candles. The real trouble with Yankee Candles is that they reek of Dollar Store consumerism in the same way Monster Energy - which the BBC once described as ‘caffeinated danger in a can’ – reeks of motocross and XFL fandom.
None of this is to say that you should start smashing Monsters2 – ingesting massive amounts of sugar and caffeine at the same time isn’t great – but that many middle-class people often experience science as class condescension. They become skeptical of science because science is skeptical of them. And, it’s fair to say, there are times when their skepticism is warranted. Science is a near-perfect system for truth-seeking, but that doesn’t mean it’s always successful at truth-finding.
For years, the FDA banned more tightly regulated European baby formulas because many contained trace additives the agency had not yet approved. When the U.S. supply chain collapsed in 2022, American parents imported European cans through gray markets, correctly guessing the regulatory decisions were nanny-state, not clinical necessity3. They were right. And the fact they were right was used by deeply commercial science deniers to peddle conspiracies about vaccines, fluoride, and 5G – many of which backed into either get-rich or get-powerful schemes.
This sort of wellness libertarianism, which has metastasized into the “Make America Healthy Again” movement, tends to turn suspicion into identity – providing middle-class consumers the rhetorical tools they need to push back against the implicit superiority expressed by the credentialist class. The trouble, of course, is that a lot of this pushback takes the form of being demonstrably wrong. No, Mountain Dew was never going to sink 13-year-old boys’ swimmers, but also there’s no proof Tylenol causes autism and plenty of proof vaccines save innumerable lives. And sunbeds do increase cancer risk.
Anti-science also has a tendency to become a photo negative of traditional science. What has RFK Jr. built but an institutional anti-science machine – distrustful, insular, and dismissive of outsiders? A familiar dynamic emerges. The leathery guy with brain worms turns to experts and says: “You are not the kind of person who should be believed because you’re not tan enough.”4
By the late 1990s, as Creed documents, television talk shows were hosting tanorexic mothers and berating them for endangering their children as studio audiences applauded. The look faded—for a bit. In 2017, a survey found that 16% of Brits reported using self-tanner in the past twelve months. In 2021, a poll of men aged 18 and over in the UK found 52% had used self-tanner at least once. Figures varied across geography – Northern Irish men remained the most committed – but the long and short of it is that plenty of Brits still want a bit of color.
That’s not just understandable. It’s a market.
The irony is that had scientists spent less time articulating their concerns about sunbeds to lazy reporters from the FT and more time doing the commercially obvious thing – inventing a safer alternative – they would have gotten rich enough for their kids to win Nobel Prizes. Instead, they got poorer as reactionary political parties defunded the academy and paler as they watched a culture turn around and condescend to them. Correct, yes. But also pale.
